1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of customer relationship management and more particularly to embedded technical support for a fielded product.
2. Description of the Related Art
The product lifecycle for any product involves prototyping, manufacturing, quality assurance, distribution, customer service and repair, and production updating and improvement. Customer service and repair for many products begin with documentation delivered with the product. As part of the documentation, frequently asked questions can be provided as can an index of common problems and solutions. A second level of customer service and repair, a Web site can be specified through which the customer can search for relevant information. As a third level of customer service and repair, e-mail and instant messaging can be supported through a Web site or directly as indicated in the documentation for the project. Finally, as a most intense form of customer service and repair, a telephone number can be provided with which the customer can speak with a customer service representative directly.
Despite the varying levels of support provided in distributing a product to customers, essential to the customer experience is the self-empowerment of the customer to troubleshoot common product problems without requiring the customer to interact with customer service professionals. Self-service tools have grown in popularity as a win-win solution addressing the desire of consumers to independently address product issues and the desire of manufacturers to lower the cost of supporting products in the field. Even still, the ability of individual customers to troubleshoot a product through self-service mechanisms can range from none at all to full competency. Thus, telephone accessible customer service representatives remain part and parcel of the modern product lifecycle.
To improve self-service adoption rates, increase call center efficiency and improve response accuracy, solutions are required that assist each of agents, customers, partners and suppliers in finding answers to support questions more efficiently. As a result, effective solutions to information search and retrieval have become critical to inquiry resolution. One popular approach includes deploying a search engine that allows users to sift through many information sources. Typically, search engines offer any or a combination of a keyword, simple text and natural language query interface.
While the utilization of a search engine for self-service information retrieval for inquiry resolution has become commonly understood, this approach has demonstrated significant limitations. In particular, the search engine is best suited for use by expert users who are familiar with the content and terminology being searched and who know which search words will most quickly yield a correct answer. However, users without domain expertise cannot easily apply the precision and relevance required for efficient retrieval. Most will recall the experience of entering a few keywords into a search engine only to receive a resulting set of hits numbering in the thousands.
To address the limitations of the basic search engine for information retrieval, manufacturers and distributors have turned to the knowledge management (KM) system to better manage and share information. The KM system has been defined as an “IT (Information Technology)-based system developed to support and enhance the organizational processes of knowledge creation, storage/retrieval, transfer, and application.” The KM system intends to enable users access to knowledge of facts, sources of information, and solutions of an organization in the course of inquiry resolution.
The modern KM system provides a knowledgebase of articles answering questions posed by inquiring users. The inquiring users generally not only include customers, but also include customer service representatives seeking answers to customer questions. Inquiring users arrive at the desired article either by direct search engine query, through case based reasoning, or through artificial intelligence (AI) based expert modeling in which a sub-set of selected articles are presented by reference to the inquiring user as a best guess of the desired articles.
Even still, for many, access to a KM system requires broadband connectivity and a personal computer. In some environments, however, access to both broadband connectivity and a personal computer is not guaranteed—for example, in an industrial factory environment or office environment. Consequently, some products like copiers, audio and video components, factory machinery and kitchen appliances that include onboard computing and a display incorporate a help function accessible through the products. Given the complexity of KM systems, however, the limited computing resources of products does not permit the use of KM system from the product itself and the embedded help function is limited to basic, textual information.